Izara doesn’t appear on the map of Bolivia. It is a tiny village of some 100 people lying in the foothills of the range of mountains that mark the edge of the Altiplano, the 14,000 foot high plateau on which most of the country’s five million people live. It is just one of the 50 communities served by three priests who live in the village of Paria some 30 miles away by an unpaved dusty road. I went with one of the priests, an Englishman, Fr John Sullivan, on his quarterly visit to Izara during which he married a young couple, baptised two babies and said Mass. But the small Indian community of Izara doesn’t have to wait another three months to celebrate their faith or receive instruction since every Sunday Luis, the village catechist, leads the community’s liturgy.

Luis is just one of the 4,000 adult catechists who have become the leaders of the church in their traditional and isolated communities. They have grown up in the communities and they get their formation as community leaders by going away for week- long courses every few months organised for the catechists of a particular area. It is this network of catechists which has become the single most important influence in the growth of a grass-roots church in Bolivia. They are, Mr Pedro Duran, the co-ordinator of the episcopal commission on catechetics, explained to me a phenomenon in Bolivia where the church relies on foreign missionaries for 90 per cent of its clergy. For the first time Bolivians have become not just helpers of foreign missionaries but an autonomous force evangelising their own people from within their highly distinctive culture and not from outside it.

An image of the emperor is set up to be venerated in his absence, (Summa Theologiae 3a, 73, 5 responsio)

Dr Coulson proffers a thesis which relates belief to imagination by referring both to assent. If he is to make a real assent to the objects of faith, the theologian must “use his imagination”, which means undertaking the intolerable wrestle with meaning, since what he seeks to renew “lies hid in language”, (p 168). Dr Coulson’s thesis is evidently to be substantiated by reference to the languages of T S Eliot and J H Newman. Dr Coulson argues that ‘Eliot’s method as a poet, and its theological implications’, (p 169), are anticipated by Newman in the Grammar of Assent. ‘Eliot’s poetry exemplifies what Newman’s theology explains’ (pp 5 and 169). Newman is presented to us as a guide in the uses of imagination for our present situation.

Dr Coulson has a gift for civilised conversation. Here he deals familiarly with the great matters, with religion and art, if not with sexuality; he deploys the hint, the echo, the overlap, catching at connections that do not have to be fully expressed; he is not all that anxious to avoid repetitions, and more than content to return some several times to a favourite quotation. He would have us share his enthusiasm for some favourite author, not for Newman and Eliot only, but for Coleridge and several Coleridgeans. He is himself at least like Coleridge in his method which is, as he says of that of the great man, ‘the very reverse of the system-building required for a magnum opus’, (p 13). And Dr Coulson’s beginning is the common one of conversation.

It is a delicate and difficult matter for me, a professional student of literature, and an amateur of theology, to review a book by a professional theologian and an amateur of literature. Odium academicum is usually a much greater danger than the more-publicized variety, theologicum. But at least I have the advantage of having already acquired a deep respect for Dr Coulson’s work, and of having learnt a lot from him about Newman in reading his earlier volume.

The main thesis of this book is clearly stated as follows:

At first sight this claim is so improbable, and indeed extraordinary, that we feel it cannot mean what it appears to say. If we can appreciate Homer and Dante and Henry James because they all make a powerful appeal to the imagination, it would seem that by analogy we can simultaneously assent to Greek paganism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Imaginatively, if our knowledge is sufficient, and our sympathies are wide enough, no doubt we can enter into all these and more. Those of us who had a classical education can remember (very likely with pleasure and gratitude) entering into the religious ideas contained in the Oresteia. But we did not for a moment think of believing them to be true. There are other statements, both religious and secular which we believe to be true, without being able or perhaps wishing to enter into them imaginatively.

There are several reasons for undertaking a comparison of Lonergan and Hume. It is my intention to move the discussion on to the realm of philosophy of religion and as the author of the most powerful critique of religion ever written in English, Hume lays strong claims for inclusion. It will, I trust, be interesting to see how Lonergan’s argument for the existence of God copes with Hume’s famous objections and to see further how a Lonerganian response might be fashioned to meet the various facets of Hume’s critique.

But before going on to philosophy of religion it will be necessary and profitable to compare and contrast the epistemologies of the two philosophers since these underpin and are presupposed by their respective positions on religious belief. Besides, there is a growing awareness today that the dispute about religious belief is at heart a dispute about rival conceptions of human rationality. It is surely significant that philosophy of religion, as a subject, dates back to the rise of empiricism. Before then there had been, to be sure, disputes, frequently acrimonious, over interpretations of religious doctrines and so forth, but it was not until then that men were affected by a profound unease surrounding religion as a phenomenon. For the first time since the classical age the legitimacy of religious belief of any kind was called in question. From the vantage-point of the twentieth century it is becoming increasingly clear that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the importation into philosophy of what was believed to be the method of science, there arose a new and revolutionary conception of human rationality that rendered religious belief problematic.

What on earth is Dr Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party all about? Can it really be, as one reviewer believes, ‘a bitter little parable about the subservience of the rich to riches; about the despair that deepens so much every day one lives, that death in the end seems to lose its point; about the ephemerality of happiness; and about the way in which a man may finally come to despise himself so much that life becomes intolerable for him’. Seen like this, Graham Greene’s story-parable — for it certainly cannot be considered an orthodox novel — is remarkably thin and — in many respects — uninformative. There is, for example, very little serious discussion of the attitude of wealthy people to money: that gradual debilitating disease of judgment and balance which leaves the victim convinced of imminent poverty, or the stealthy atrophying of every generous impulse. It is hard to find anything to do with money that could not have been more adequately examined in a normal domestic setting of the type found in Bennett or Galsworthy, or the opening chapters of Sense and Sensibility. Neither, I am sure, would it be useful to assume that Mr Greene constructed his parable with the object of indulging his well-known interest in Russian roulette — a version of which forms the prize-winning entertainment at the last of Dr Fischer’s parties. There is a sense in which the explanations and commentaries do not seem to be able to account for the material, and yet given the brevity and apparent simplicity of the text this adds what can reasonably be regarded as a further curtain of bewilderment.